IESG,
Unfortunately it is necessary to bring this appeal to the IESG as the chairs
& chartering AD's have not taken the ample opportunity to recognize the
seriousness of the problem of allowing a chair to ask an ambiguous question,
then decide what it means after the fact.
As the video of the SF meeting
ftp://limestone.uoregon.edu/pub/videolab/video/ietf56/ietf56 - 03202003 -
INT ipv6.mpg (989MB)
clearly shows, the overriding goal was declaring consensus, not on actually
recognizing or achieving it. From comments on the mail list, the chair
appears to have had a personal mission of getting SL removed from the scoped
architecture document and progressing it without discussion of the one scope
most widely deployed in the IPv4 network. This oversight will result in a
serious degradation of the quality of the WG output. There was and still is
no consensus in the WG about what 'deprecate site-local' means, just a
declaration by the chair that consensus occurred.
During the SF meeting multiple current & former IESG & IAB members felt the
need to get clarity about the question being asked, and there was an
explicit unanswered request by Dave Thaler asking for an indication what
action implementations should take if elimination was selected. The best the
chair offered was the response at 2:13:19 "I'll resay what I said earlier
which is I had said we would say eliminate it or keep it and then we'd have
multiple choices if we kept it but apparently if we eliminate it we will
also have multiple choices about what exactly that means". In other words,
the chair acknowledged the ambiguity of the question, but persisted in
calling it despite the lack of anyone in the room to make an informed
decision about the outcome of their choice. The question asked to the list
was no clearer.
The declaration of consensus must be overturned as an abuse of the process.
This should be done soon as the whole event has created a state of confusion
where network managers are questioning how they are supposed to deploy IPv6
without locally controlled address space. The subsequent discussion on the
mail list identified multiple work items, which the WG should or is already
undertaking, and those can be accomplished without the chairs calling
further questions on the topic. In particular, a document identifying the
requirements for local use address space is underway. Until the WG agrees on
the requirements, there is no possibility for the group to evaluate the
utility of the current SL or other approaches.
Tony Hain
----
While waiting for the 989MB to download, jump to 24 Apr message below which
contains excerpts from the SF video which highlight the confusion over the
meaning of the question being asked.